Since I moved my blog to this self-hosted platform, many of you have reached out and asked how you could host the same kind of blog. Good news: today I release Open Blog Revolution, an open-source blogging website template meant for writers.

The great social-media noise escape

Blogs are back. It’s not an objective assessment, rather a feeling. But there isn’t a day where I don’t read a post about a creator, developer, designer, publisher, or hobbyist deciding to get back to blogging.

By back to blogging I mean leaving in some capacity social networks to share content on something that resembles old-fashioned blogs. Content heavy publishing on the internet.

One could argue blogs never disappeared, and that’s fair. Elmcat did a massive investigation and coding work to map the indie RPG blogosphere. Even if the scope of their research is limited to a very specific niche, the data shows an overwhelming increase of blogs from 2003 to 2025. (also what happened in 2011???)

More people writing and more people reading: that’s good.

But the question remains: what ink and pen do we use to write? As you might know, I hosted the predecessor to The Coded Type on a popular blogging/newsletter platform, Substack. It didn’t work for me. I’m still grateful for the feedback and support received by readers of my blog back then, but publishing using that platform made me more uncomfortable with every new post. Substack didn’t feel like sharing thoughts, sparking a conversation, or taking part in a community; it felt more like feeding a platform-as-performance activity.

I suppose this is a structural side-effect of publishing content in a social-network-like context, where the bulk of interaction is about liking and sharing. Squeezed between engagement notifications and frequent pings when other authors published content, I soon felt compelled to publish more, even if I didn’t have something meaningful to share.

I involuntarily changed the tone of my posts to adopt some pseudo-marketing lingo and display an upbeat mood. I was growing uncomfortable, staring at the blog stats and reflecting on the meaning of an expression recently added to my vocabulary: metrics of success.

Despite having strong feelings, I was unsure what to do with them until two things happened:

1. I went back to doing web development on larger projects and acquainted myself with new stacks and design philosophies.
2. I read (partially) the PhD thesis of Julie Blanc, a web developer, layout designer, and researcher who co-developed an open-source layout framework.

In the first chapters of her thesis, focused on PagedJS, Julie Blanc explains how the tools we use are an emotive, psychological, and intellectual extension of our self. By choosing specific tools, we not only change the environment around us (by using them to produce objects or effects), but we alter the way we think, and ultimately, how we feel.

Reading Blanc’s work was liberating and gave me the nudge I needed to leave Substack and build my own self-hosted blog. It was a bit scary at first. What was I going to do out in the wild, building my own publishing tool? Educating myself on indie publishing strategies and using tools focused on writing, not on gaining acknowledgment, lowered my stress and impostor syndrome (a tiny bit 😉). This has been good for the brain and the heart! The unexpected consequence is that I got involved in commissioned projects that share similar values.

So, today I’m excited to release in the wild the fruit of that work, Open Blog Revolution.

Open Blog Revolution

(Yes, this name is a pun/homage to the OSR, and was picked collectively by The Lost Bay server crowd).

There’s plenty of blogging templates, frameworks out there. Some are simple, other complex, some are free, a lot quite expensive. Before jumping on the laptop to code OBR I formalized the problem I was trying to solve.

As a webdev, the challenge I saw is twofold and a bit of an oxymoron:

• The point of self-hosting is to be free to host anywhere without being locked into a specific platform.
• Most often, authors lack the time or technical knowledge to build and run websites. As a consequence, they resort to using all-in-one platforms that lock them in, and defeat the initial goal.

Open Blog Revolution is my attempt at solving this. It’s open-source, released with a MIT license (one of the most simple and permissive licenses), and lightweight. You can host it pretty much anywhere: your own server, a fancy cloud provider, or the free GitHub Pages or Netlify tiers.

The main goal is to make things simple and support authors on the path to owning their own publishing tools. In addition, the project follows the principles of Resilient Web Design: building fast, lightweight websites accessible to the largest possible audience, even on my crappy laptop from 2005.

If you’d like to run your own independent space and put some distance between you and “big tech” apps, here’s what you can do:

• Preview OBR: https://the-coded-type.github.io/open-blog-revolution/
• Build your blog: Visit the repo, read the docs, and install it.
• Ask for help: On The Lost Bay server in the #the-coded-type channel.
• Suggest/upvote features: Use the discussion forum.
• Contribute: Help with code or documentation on the repo. (If you wish to contribute I suggest reaching out first)
• Support: If you need help building a bespoke blog for yourself or a multi-author blog for your organization, summon me as a freelancer. Paid work on OBR-related projects directly funds the public code.

Here’s a simplified a non exhaustive todo list, things I’ll work on next (let me know if I should add something)

• better accessibility
• more documentation
• blogger import
• video documentation
• dedicated backend
• podcast page
• better web-to-print

Early OBR adopter!

I did a soft launch on Discord a few weeks ago, and OBR already has an adopter! Personable Thoughts was built 100% with OBR. Here is what Markus, its author, says:

Basically, when I started blogging, I was never sure it was going to be a thing I would keep at. I might have written three posts, read by two people and decided it was not for me, so I wanted to set something up that would offer me the least resistance to get started, while being free and giving me the basic tools of the blog: an RSS feed and a blogroll.

Having been in the game for a bit over a year now, I’m fairly convinced that it’s something I’d like to continue doing. Earlier this year I moved my day job professional site from a paid Wordpress solution to a Github-hosted site, and after realising how much nicer this was to work with, I wanted to do the same thing with my blog. However, while I have some tech knowledge, very little of it is web related, so I didn’t know how to build what I wanted from scratch: a blog with a functional RSS and blogroll.

So when IKO launched the Open Blog Revolution, I figured that was my chance to get on the boat, and maybe even help steer it. My blog is now hosted on Cloudflare, building from a Github repository (both free), so I have access to all the files, and have full control of what’s happening. The template made it easy to set up and customize to make it my own, though I did need to ask for some css advice, and I am enjoying this a lot more than Google’s limited offering. And because I have all the files, I can always take my toys and go somewhere else, if Cloudflare starts being annoying.

In addition to jumping on the blogging caravan Markus is also the first contributor to OBR 🥇, he catched a few bugs, and added some documentation.

If, like Marrkus, you’re tempted to run your own blogging website, wait no more head to Open Blog Revolution

More publishing projects

Through The Coded Type, I am building a series of open-source publishing tools, creating a convergence between my design work at The Lost Bay Studio and my web development day job.

In addition to OBR, I’ve been developing a Markdown+CSS to PDF workflow called Pixels and Paper. It’s Built on PagedJS by Julie Blanc. I’m currently using it to layout upcoming TLBS products, most notably The Lost Bay RPG.

The source code for P&P will be released under an MIT license, just like OBR. More on this next year! Below are a handful of screenshots of what I’ve been building with it.

Soundtrack

I listened to Patch Notes by Hélène Vogelsinger while writing this post.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Enjoy the end of the year. I’ll talk to you soon.

Iko